Mutiny!

This is coolbert:

Mutiny - - a collective disobedience to orders!! - - Bert.

In this regard, Bert is much more knowledgeable than was the Chief of Naval Operations - - Elmo Zumwalt, who when asked by a Congressional Committee - - what is mutiny, could not reply and deferred to his legal officer!!

Here is a subject the French Army would rather forget?

Mutiny - - 1917.

"The French Army Mutinies of 1917 took place on the near totality of the Western Front in Northern France . . . Their existence remained virtually unknown at the time while their full extent and intensity has only been officially revealed since 1983."

French troops, during the Great War [WW1], exhausted, embittered, having just endured another fruitless offensive action that was for naught, refused to conduct further OFFENSIVE ACTIONS!! Emphasis upon OFFENSIVE ACTIONS! No more "GOING OVER THE TOP"!!

["going over the top" refers to leaving the safety of your trench position, moving out into "no mans" land, exposing yourself to enemy fire, more correctly, the concentrated fire of sited and protected German machine guns and artillery!!]

"By this time [1917], over one million French fatalities (306,000 in 1914; 334,000 in 1915; 217,000 in 1916; 121,000 in early 1917) out of a male population of twenty million had 'deadened the French will to attack'."

[all the stuffings had gone out of the French troops by this time [1917]. The will to continue had gone "snuff"! Cran [guts] and elan' [spirited action] no longer sufficed in the combat of WW1, and this was apparent to the enlisted!!]

This was not, however, a violent mutiny!! Just a refusal to obey orders for further OFFENSIVE ACTIONS!!

"the men 'wished their officers no harm'; they just refused 'to return to the trenches'. The mutinies 'were not a refusal of war' simply 'a certain way of waging it'."

This mutiny was WIDESPREAD and simultaneous [?] among the many units involved, and rendered the French army more or less impotent on the battlefield at the time.

"As the French Army comprised a total of 113 infantry divisions by the end of 1917, this puts the proportion of destabilized French infantry divisions at 43%."

Surprisingly so - - or is it [!!], the French response was not so draconian and harsh as might have been expected. Guilty parties were executed and some sent to penal servitude, but, again, the response of the French high command was not so brutal and cruel as might have been imagined. Keep in mind too that this was not an uprising in the common sense of the word, some degree of discretion being necessitated for continued French participation in the war being made manifest!!

"only 43 executions were carried out and can be solidly documented"



This particular wiki entry misses an important point regarding the French Army mutiny of 1917. GERMAN INTELLIGENCE DID NOT - - EVEN HAVE THE SLIGHTEST INKLING THAT A MUTINY WAS OR HAD TAKEN PLACE!! THE FRENCH ARMY HAD REACHED A BREAKING POINT AND THIS WAS TOTALLY MISSED BY THE GERMAN OPPOSITION!!

"the moral is to the physical as three is to one" - - Napoleon.

coolbert.